![]() ![]() It was certainly a good work-out for the Velvia Bulmer setting I had stored in my camera, based upon a film simulation that had proved more versatile than I was expecting. My eyes began to rebel a mere hour into combing the many floors for sights and wonders. The amount of stuff in the Pitt Rivers museum… the combined haul of several centuries of global exploration, trade and possibly the odd bit of thievery… is pretty much overwhelming. A hop onto the Great Western Railway for a day out in Oxford visiting the Pitt Rivers museum provided me with ample opportunity to play with colour, light and shadow. This adds a depth and richness to the colour that is a pleasure to work with, providing you exercise restraint in post-processing when it comes to saturation. Another reason for shooting in JPEG was so that I could use the Colour Chrome effect found in the new wave of cameras such as the X-T3. You can read about those on this page here. I’ve decided to experiment first with JPEGs rather than RAW files, imposing a base layer of limitations upon myself and further tying myself to the in-camera custom-profile film-simulations I created a couple of years back for inspiration. So I’m taking it slowly with Capture One. An set of tools both powerful and subtle indeed but… well… one can see how easy it would be to fall down the rabbit-hole with such dangerous freedom. You could then follow up by adding even more styles in radiant filters, brushes and whole washes to the image. What this means in practice is that you could apply a style with a gradient filter to the lower portion of a landscape and dial back the strength until it balanced nicely with the sky. Happily with Capture One you can apply presets - now called ‘styles’ - to a layer, and in turn you can adjust the opacity of that layer. There was always the option of getting Adobe Photoshop, but that would have meant getting a subscription… and as I mentioned in my previous post I was somewhat unhappy with Adobe’s recent business practices.Įnter Capture One. What worked in enhancing a cloudy afternoon became overkill in a photograph shot in the golden hour, and although I was very happy with the intuitive simplicity and cataloguing of Lightroom, I was beginning to hunger for more control. The difficulty in applying them was that frequently they were too much, especially when applied to JPEG images. I used to create a lot of presets in Lightroom, nearly all of them based upon the looks of photographers I love. To quote Mervyn Peake, “I’d paint a dustbin if I found it beautiful.” The sweet-spot for me probably confusingly lies somewhere in-between, trying to apply the viewpoint of a hopeless romantic to banal, slightly depressing scenes. I’ve always loved both the dream-like splendour of technicolor - especially in the Powell & Pressburger films such as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life & Death… but I have a huge love too for that dark, moody, autumnal aesthetic of the downbeat American movies of the seventies, found in such works as Badlands, Charlie Varrick and Being There. Not to the extreme almost graphic-design extent of Harry Gruyaert or Saul Leiter, but again in that rich Kodak memory way, trying to make something cinematic of the mundane. I’m finding that I want a certain plasticity, a colour and a mood to my images. One thing has struck me though… I’m not shooting documentary work, I’m taking a photograph to try to find something heightened, something beautiful in the commonplace. There’s even more possibility for confusion and second-guessing now. Recently I made the jump from Lightroom to Capture One, and I’ve become rather excited at the opportunities afforded by the powerful colour editing tools contained within… and rather daunted. Mostly, I wind up some place in-between and lean towards the rich look of the first true wave of colour photography - the straight topographical documentary work of Joel Sternfeld, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore and the rich colours and plasticity wrought by those early low speed Kodak slide films. ![]() It always ends the same way, I come back another night and look again and worry at how maybe I went too far, how I should dial everything back, try to ground everything in digital reality. trying to tease something out of a memory. I flick through my photography books and have my vision re-adjusted by the vibrancy of a Saul Leiter and begin to noodle away at past images…. Sometimes I feel I go too far in creating a mood, a false memory, pushing shadows and tinting skies… trying to evoke something that maybe was never there. ![]() I’ve ever been conflicted when it comes to colour. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |